Teardown of a vintage Lucido 20 year old LED torch.

By modern standards this very old torch (flashlight) looks a bit dull. But when you realise it was possibly the FIRST of the LED lights of this style, then it's a lot more interesting.
I bought this over two decades ago when Nichia had just launched the first commercial white LEDs in 1996 and an adventurous company used ten of them in this light.

It was hard to get hold of the new white LEDs, and in the electronic distributors they cost £10 each! It follows that this torch was VERY expensive. I can't remember how much, but it took a lot of self-convincing to actually buy one. It was bought via an advert in an electronics magazine, and at the same time I bought one of the first, and equally radical white LED keyring flashlights. (A Laughing Rabbit Photon micro light.)

My justification for buying it was to give it as a gift to my parents who lived in a rural area on the Isle of Man, where the storms often cause blackouts by damaging overhead lines.
When it arrived I very cautiously took it to bits with the same apprehension of opening a brand new phone these days. I probed the silicone potting just enough to see one of the resistors, and then put it back together again.

The main circuit board is just a star of ten eighth Watt 12 ohm resistors going to each of the ten precious Nichia LEDs. I'm guessing that part of the reason the LEDs are spaced off the PCB is to make space for the resistors underneath as well as avoiding the stresses of mounting an LED hard against a PCB. The silicone potting is very tough - like glazing sealant, so I stopped trying to remove it as the risk of damaging the PCB was too high.

One of the main marketing features of this torch was that it would run continuously for a month on a set of batteries. When all the previous torches had been tungsten and started going dull and orange before blacking out completely in the region of an hour or so, that was a radical thing.

A few years later I also bought my first white LED head torch (a Petzl Tikka) in 2001 after a very annoying shift at Disney Paris, working on a control panel in a very inaccessible area while an old tungsten head torch dwindled away to a dull orange glow. One of the riggers I was working alongside loaned me his Petzl Tikka, and I was so impressed that on my first visit back home I bought one from a sports store. It was a revelation. Much better to work with and massive run time, even with just three AAA cells.

These days it would be odd to buy a torch or flashlight with anything other than an LED source.

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Видео Teardown of a vintage Lucido 20 year old LED torch. канала bigclivedotcom